Beniland on Holiday

On a national holiday in November, my kid and I took a trip to Beniland, the small amusement park outside of the zoo in Sendai. It was crowded but less crowded than I had expected. Overall, it was a lot of fun.

Usually the entrance fee is 1,000 yen each, then you also pay for tickets to ride the rides.

On this specially occasion, they waved the entry fee entirely, which was excellent for our budget. In addition, the day pass for unlimited rides had changed price, too. Usually, for adults the prices 4,500 yen and for children it is 3,500 yen but on this day the price for anybody was 3,000 yen.

That means for the low price of 6000 yen, my kid and I could ride whatever rides we wanted to in Beniland.

We started in the smaller kids area before maneuvering to the bigger rides elsewhere in the park. I was impressed by how reasonably priced the food was. 

My only big frustration with the park was a that the mystery house (haunted house type attraction) towards the back of the park was for some reason cash only. They wouldn't take tickets and didn't care about our day pass. It was only 300 yen each I think, but it being cash only was weird.

This whole area of the park seems to have been renovated and improved since my last visit. That said, going through the mystery house with a group of loud teen girls behind me is an experience I would prefer never to do again.

Tiny view of the Megadance from the ferris wheel.

The rest of the rides went really well, save for when my kid went on the Mega Dance, a big swirling coaster, and came off feeling very upset by how scared she had gotten, after which she proceeded to have a bit of meltdown.

As we were with friends that day, we went to stand in line for one of the more gentle rides back in the kiddy area while I talked my kid through her meltdown in English. After I had connected with my kid and she had started to calm down, I noticed no fewer than three people standing directly in front of us in line, staring directly at us. The group seemed to be two teenage girls and their mom, all of whom were old enough to know how very rude that was.

If I were Japanese and speaking Japanese, no one in the park would even have looked in our direction while my child had a meltdown. I've seen this happen so many times.

Because this was a gaijin mom talking in English, they seemed to decide that we were a) monkeys at the zoo, incapable of grasping nuance so staring is a-ok, or b) part of some drama they're watching on TV, not real people in a real setting, really right in front of them being real. I made eye contact with them and nothing changed.

Clearly they understood some English because when I said to my kid in English that I was getting frustrated about the people staring at us, they suddenly chose to look elsewhere.

My kid did recover from her meltdown and rode the Megadance two more times before we left, thoroughly conquering her fear.

While I was bothered by many fellow park-goers during our time there, our trip to Beniland was so much fun that I am looking forward to checking it out the next time they have an entrance-fee free special.